[Jprogramming] The Accessible Dictionary released

[Henry Rich]

Agreed that the important thing for NuVoc is to give the beginner what 
they need, in a form that they can understand without having to follow a 
trail.

But asking a genuine beginner whether they need to see the ranks is like 
asking a congressman a question about economics, and just as likely to 
discover the right answer.

Here's a proposal to consider:

in http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Vocabulary/ltdot, for example, where 
we now have

<. y (Floor)

we could instead have

<. y (Floor, operates on individual atoms)

The 'operates on individual atoms' bit would link to a discussion of 
verb rank.

By seeing the rank described verbally, right there on every verb, a 
beginner would notice this subtle difference between verbs, and would 
eventually be tempted to understand what it means.

The questions posted to this Forum prove that you can't survive as a J 
coder without understanding rank.  I think NuVoc should accept the 
mission of teaching the beginner that fact, as painlessly as possible.


Henry Rich


On 1/20/2014 10:47 AM, Ian Clark wrote:
> @Brian - Thanks for your appreciation. It's encouraging. Throughout I've
> had the niggling feeling that the J Dic was hard to improve on, and I was
> adding little or no value.
>
> Unlike the J Dic, NuVoc doesn't show the Rank(s) of a verb. The original
> idea was for it to do so. But I think that's advanced information for a
> beginner, and best seen by clicking through to the J Dic via the "See Also".
>
> Others will vehemently disagree, and I think I can predict who they'll be.
>
> But maybe I'll come to see that a bold button in the same place on every
> title line to click through to the Dic entry would be good, if not
> essential.
>
> If anyone wants to go through all the verbs and add the Ranks to the title
> lines, I'm not going to throw a tantrum. Not if its done consistently, and
> right.
>
> Can we hear the authoritative voice of a genuine beginner about this?
>
>
> On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 4:45 AM, Brian Schott <schott.brian at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Ian,
>>
>> That is amazing. Thank you for that great resource.
>>
>> I don't know if I dare ask the following, but, here goes. Is there any way
>> to add a feature -- I think it's called a tool-tip -- to the main page
>> which would show the rank of each verb when someone hovers over the
>> primitive? If so, would other folks use such a feature?
>>
>> --
>> (B=)
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